Utilitarianism Flashcards
Jeremy Bentham 1789
• a time of social and scientific change
• many were fighting for greater human rights and a fairer society (democracy and interests of the majority)
• Bentham set out theory of utilitarianism when writing ‘the principles of morals and legislation’
• allows for moral decisions without presupposition of God
-“create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you- will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others- or to diminish something of their pains”
• inspired founders of UCL, believed education should be made more widely available and not only to those who were wealthy and members of the established church, as was the case at the traditional universities of Oxford and Cambridge
Hume
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as will as what we shall do”
Bentham’s Utilitarianism (general)
• outspoken advocate of law reform, a critic of established political doctrines like natural law and was the first to produce utilitarian justification for democracy
• discussed prison reform, religion, poor relief, international law, and animal welfare.
• advocated universal suffrage and decriminalisation of homosexuality
• he discovered the phrase “greatest good for the greatest number” in Joseph Priestley’s essay on government
• widely respected by 1820s, his ideas influenced reform in public administration, writings still relevant to debates in social policy, legal positivism an welfare economics
• Bentham as attempting to solve the problems of humanity but rejected religion because Christians preached poverty was God given and couldn’t change. Bentham didn’t believe God would determine this
Bentham’s social context (NEEDS HW TO BE FINISHED)
• was motivated by the desire to establish universal theory that could be applied to all ethical situations
• his influence on 18 century society and beyond was considerable as he sought a theory of ethics that would iron out inequality
G.M. Trevelyan
“the factory system which at its first coming bade fair to destroy the health and happiness of the race, has been gradually converted into any instrument to level up to the average material conditions under which labor is carried on”
Three parts of Utilitarianism
-human motivations (human beings are inclined to avoid bad as it often results in pain and pursue good as this results in pleasure)
-the principle of utility (usefulness)
-the hedonic calculus (how to apply the principles of utility- a system of measuring how good or bad something is)
Utilitarianism and Consequentialism
• utilitarianism is teleological and consequentialist as it is concerned with the outcome or consequences of an action
• utilitarianism defines good or bad actions depending on the consequences one course of action will lead to: of all the options available take the one with the greatest aggregate well being produced
• teleological (Greek ‘end’) looks at the consequences, the results of an action, to decide whether it’s right or wrong
• for the teleological thinker, the end justifies the means and rightness would be judged by the end produced
Bentham’s theory of motivation
• humans are motivated by pleasure and pain
• he is thus a hedonist, believing pleasure is the ultimate motivation
• this is a moral fact because pleasure and pain identify what is a good or a bad action
The Principle of Utility
• after identifying pleasure and pain as qualities for identifying moral goodness, he developed the utility principle’
• rightness or wrongness s judged by its usefulness to produce pleasure
• pleasure produces a feeling of happiness which is used interchangeably in the principle
• the action that produces the most happiness is the most moral
-“an action is right if it produces the greatest good for the greatest number”
(greatest good= greatest pleasure/happiness and the least pain or sadness; greatest number = majority of people)
• maximising happiness for the most people is difficult, as the possible consequences s of different actions must be measured to clearly establish which option does in fact generate the most pleasure and least pain
Hedonic Calculus
involves weighing up the pleasure and pain produced by certain actions using 7 criteria:
• intensity: impact on a person
• duration: how long will pleasure/pain last
• certainty: over whether it is pleasurable or painful
• propinquity:how close the experience brings you or how it distances you from others
• fecundity: the chance it has of not being followed by pleasure if the experience is pleasure
• purity: the chance it has of being followed by pleasure if the experience is pain and vice versa
• extent: the number of people affected by it
